Reflecting on My Discovery

The feeling of “finding myself” last night was really an amazing and intense moment. I think I did a good job of capturing why it was so amazing, but I may not have actually captured the emotion itself. Using single words to describe it won’t do it justice, but the best words I can find are "awestruck” and “dumbfounded.” In addition to what those words represent. In that frozen, speechless moment of awe and motionlessness, there was also a tingling sensation of euphoria that went from my head, through my shoulders and arms and down my torso and legs. Sounds sort of like an orgasm, right? Well…isn’t that another way to describe euphoria?

The feeling was one of simplicity and peace. It was both an end of a massive (unconscious) search and the beginning of new chapter. It was one of the most complete and total senses of closure I’ve ever felt. And the satisfaction that goes with that, the satisfaction of accomplishing a 29 year effort is indescribable (think of how good you feel after accomplishing something you’ve been working on for 1 year…multiplying that by 29 doesn’t even do it justice). For me (and I expect for you as well) the activity of achieving complete self-awareness and self-understanding is integrated into everything I do, and the discoveries I gain from it are critical to my life. Knowing who I am allows me understand what I have to offer (to myself and others), and it gives me a purpose in life.

Every effort/activity in my life contributes to the goal of discovering who I am. This is done through the combination of 1) contributing to the world by being myself, 2) exploring new and different ideas and 3) harvesting my reactions to discover new lessons* (detail below). Interestingly, it is a never-ending effort to achieve this goal, but that doesn’t mean I can’t achieve it. It just means that in the instant I do, I have had an experience that immediately takes me away from the state of complete self-awareness, and then I instantly re-instate my efforts to achieve it once again because those efforts are integrated into everything I do.

Anyway, back to my moment of self-awareness. The moment itself lasted about 60 seconds, and the more experiences I have between then and now, the more I will depart from that state of complete self-awareness. I realized that as soon as the moment was over, and it was sad in a very post-coidal way, but also very satisfying in the same way you feel after an orgasm that has been building up for 29 years.

*****************************************

*I mentioned before that everything I do contributes to the never-ending effort to discover myself. At a very high level, I can divide my actions into 3 categories.

The first is the activity of being me and practicing who I am. This is about taking what I know about myself, what I love and enjoy, what I like and dislike and then going out and just being myself. It’s like taking something you know, whether you’ve known it your whole life (something you learned ages ago) or just learned it, (a new trick or a new skill) and then using it in practice.

The second is exploring. This is, in some ways, making a departure from who I am (not departing from the part of me that needs to explore, though, because, for now, the need to explore is part of who I am and I don’t want to change). I guess you can also say that exploring is a departure from what I’ve already learned or discovered. This involves doing new or different things, trying out new or different ideas, or even just making slight tweaks to the things I know, like, or dislike to see if I can learn something that I like better or find something I’m sure I don’t like. Either way, this exploration gives me new information to work with in my understanding of the world and, more importantly, of myself. Another important thing to realize is that it’s not just my own exploration that creates new information to consider. Everything else that happens in the world is input as well. Other people’s words or actions, and my reactions to them, my emotions, give me great input to consider.

The third category is the harvesting. With every new activity, idea or action that I explore; with every new event or discussion I observe in the world around me, I gain new information that I must consider in the definition of myself. For me, harvesting all of this information to continuously redefine who I am is a critical activity in life.

Each of these three activities happen continuously in an endless twisting and looping mesh that you could call the fabric of my life. You can picture it as a twisting, traveling, growing, animated, rolling wave made of very small fibers that each represent experiences and lessons. The wave grows both higher and longer as it travels forward, sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly. At any given time, you could take a snapshot of that wave, and the person I am will be the intricate mesh of fibers in the unique configuration on the right edge of the wave at that moment in time. Taking that snapshot is no easy task, but I seem to have managed to hold the wave still for about 60 seconds the other night, see it, understand it and then let it go. Even farther off to the right of the wave is the future. I’m not there, but I can see it, or at least some of it. Parts of it are definitely hidden from me. There are endless things out there, some inspiring and amazing, some threatening and dangerous, and some that I will simply pass on by.